Saturday, July 26, 2014

Boyhood/Girlhood

Richard Linklater's new film Boyhoodsounds fantastic, and yet I've
been consciously avoiding going to see it. Two years into social
transition, one and a half into medical transition, I still feel that
little fishhook of pain in my chest when I contemplate boyhood and my lack thereof.

To comply with
the popular trans discourse, I suppose I would have to claim that I
“always was” a boy, even when I didn't know it. To be sure, there
can be both rhetorical and emotional value in the “always was”
narrative, but for me that is a conscious rewriting of my history,
which doesn't sit quite right with me.

Not that it's not
to some degree true. There is a truth in the suggestion that I always
was a boy; there is a truth in the admission that I never had a
boyhood. These truths are not contradictory so much as complementary.
Each alone only tells a fragment of the story.

For me, the value
of the “always was” narrative is very limited. I see its use for
trans people who were conscious of their gender from an early age;
but what does it really mean for me? For a female-assigned child with
two cis brothers, who deeply internalized the “(birth)
genitals=gender” message of a cissexist society, who could plainly
see that I was not a boy in the precise way that my brothers were
boys, who did not know that there was any other way to be a boy and
who therefore assumed that my desire to be a boy belonged to the same
imaginary realm as my desire to go to wizard school? (And later, on
discovering feminism, decided my desire to be a boy must be rooted in
internalized misogyny?)

I find more use
in a negative framing and a paradox: it's not that I “always was”
a boy, but that I never wasa
girl, and that I was not a girl even as I was a girl.

The logic of
Jewish philosopher and theologian Peter Ochs is helpful here. For
Ochs, the dyadic logic of binarism – the notion that not-X
is the opposite of X –
is properly applicable only to
situations of suffering. To the sufferer, actions either help
alleviate the suffering (X)
or they do not help (not-X),
and as such the world can be divided into the binary categories of X
and not-X.
In all other situations, however, binarism is misapplied, and it is
an oversimplification and a logical misstep to assume that not-X
is necessarily the opposite or
absence of X.

This, I think, is
the logic of transition, and it helps to explain why trans people,
particularly in the earlier stages of transition, can be so sensitive
to seemingly small aspects of the gendered world, such as being
called “sir” or “ma'am” at the grocery store. A transitioning
person experiences gender from a place of suffering, and as such
divides the world into two categories: my-gender and not-my-gender.
Anything that reinforces my-gender helps to alleviate the suffering;
anything that reinforces not-my-gender does not help.

(Clearly, I am
referring to a binary-identified trans person. I have not yet thought
through the implications of this logic – or even, if I'm to be
perfectly honest, the limited temporality inherent to the concept of
“transition” – with respect to non-binary genders.)

However, the
binary logic of my-gender and not-my-gender only applies once I am
consciously aware of my gender. Accordingly, it would be inaccurate
to retroject this binarism onto my childhood. My childhood as I lived
it at the time was, as far as I knew, a girlhood. My childhood as I
view it from my current perspective as a male adult is
not-a-girlhood. Both perspectives are true.

Much as I long
for boyhood, driven by losstalgia
for a past that was never mine, and much as I could psychoanalyze my
childhood gender identity, seeking evidence for the sublimation of my
own felt maleness into an abundance of carefully nurtured fictional
personae – even so, I have had experiences that
turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Anglo-American culture categorizes
under the heading of “girlhood.” I was given dolls and dresses
alongside legos and pants. I was permitted, even encouraged, to
embrace masculinity as male-assigned children still tend not, even in
liberal households, to be encouraged to embrace femininity. I first
embraced feminism as an insider, and I know firsthand fears such as
that of walking alone among men as a (perceived) woman at night
(though I think I am a better feminist now that I am no longer at war
with the feminine in me).

My girlhood, as I
understand it now, is not a matter of having “been” a girl, but
of having experienced much of what is culturally considered to be
part of girlhood. It is not an ontological but an epistemological
girlhood. Even as I ache for the boyhood I should have had, I
recognize that I have learned a great deal from girlhood and that it
has been a major contributor to the man I am becoming.

I don't know if I
will ever learn to lovemy
girlhood. But I hope to someday be at peace with it.